Price bombs out in the bush

By ERWIN CHLANDA

Tina MacFarlane, the 2016 CLP candidate for Lingiari and a white pastoralist, performed much better in the remote area voting than her successor in the current election, Jacinta Price, whose campaigning relied heavily on her Aboriginality.

Price (centre) is going back to council, the ABC reports.

MacFarlane received 2922 votes in the Remote Mobile polling – in non-urban areas which are mostly Aboriginal – while the sitting member, Labor’s Warren Snowdon, received 6781 first preference votes there.

That means MacFarlane had the equivalent of 43% of Snowdon’s vote.

The equivalent numbers for the current election were 3113 votes for Price and 11,467 for Snowdon, or a share of just 27% share for the CLP challenger.

Price did much better in the seven Alice Springs booths, contributing substantially to her overall swing of 4.45%: Snowdon’s votes amounted only to 82% of those received by Price (4286 vs 5165).

In 2016 he had scored the equivalent of 94% of Tina MacFarlane’s votes in The Alice.

In 2016 there were some significant players in Lingiari, apart from the two big ones, ALP (17,056 first preference votes) and CLP (13,605).

The participation rate across the entire electorate was dismally low: Only 66.16% of the 69,994 enrolment turned out to vote, and 4.77% of them voted informally. It is believed that only a little more than 60% of bush voters are enrolled.

The turnout in 2016 was 79%.

The higher number of formal votes resulted from the addition of some urban and semi-urban areas to the electorate in the north, a factor that also appears to have favoured Price.

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4 Comments (starting with the most recent)

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ArrernteArelhe

Posted May 24, 2019 at 12:40 pm

Eva – What for God’s sake has that Snowdon ever achieved?
What has Jacinta ever achieved in her time as a councillor or so-called advocate? She is useless.
Blindly voting for her based on the fact she is Aboriginal and she supports racist views is not a reasonable excuse to put her in the job.
She can talk but actions speak louder than words. I almost wish she would have got in to prove all her followers wrong.

As somneone who once lived in the NT and has a daughter who has worked for years for the Aboriginal community, and a son-in-law who works with the Yothu Yindi Band, I am not speaking out of ignorance when I say that if Jacinta is not voted in then they have missed out on a very admirable person.
What for God’s sake has that Snowdon ever achieved?
After all these years of going down hill. Suicide rate the highest in Australia. Drugs, STDs the highest in Australia, imprisonment the highest.
Perhaps she would be too tough, like get the women to stop drinking when pregnant so that there is no more Fetal Alchol Syndrome in their babies. They are so cruel, these women.
What despair for the Aboriginal people. May God help them.

Having finally had the time to take a look at the AEC website and the bush vote it really does appear that the CLP have been in freefall for pretty much all of the bush and even in certain parts of the NT.
It seems even more surprising given the CLP did actually get out there to many of those locations as well, well at least according to the Bush Telegraph.
Being a bit curious about this, I asked a few Aboriginal friends about their views and their answers were simple.
Bush Communities and the urban Aboriginal Community of the towns severely dislike Jacinta Price and they severely dislike her family.
A lot of this seems to cropped up long before the election as well, although all those Sky News interviews and trying to stop the Flag on ANZAC Hill doesn’t seem to have left remote communities with much trust in her looking after their best interests.
At first I thought this might be some different mob mentality about other mobs (as can be the case sometimes) but one of them told me she was crushed in Yuendumu and the Walpiri areas as well and on checking the mobile team results, I can see they were dead right.
It’s really not a good sign when even your own extended family in Aboriginal culture won’t vote for you and I would say the CLP will be very quietly considering whom to run as a different alternative to next time.
Especially given the tumultuous nature of the candidate, along with the childish refusal to admit she lost. It seems all the big noting and grand standing in the world means nothing without substance and hard work.
So on that note, it now begs the question of armchair politicos, with Price resoundly beaten and never likely to ever gain the swing she needs to win in either the towns or the Bush of the NT, who will the CLP be thinking of to take the reins at the next Federal Election?
Could it be Senate Ticket Number 2 and son-in-Law of Alice Springs Mayor, young Joshua Burgoyne?
I for one, will be eager to see, when we start getting murmors about it in another two years.